Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people

#14551

Alastair Norcross

#14562

Overall Influence

Alastair Norcross is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, specializing in normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy. He is a defender of utilitarianism.

#14552

James O. Prochaska

#14563

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

James O. Prochaska was professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island. He was the lead developer of the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change beginning in 1983. Career James Prochaska was born in Detroit. He earned his B.A. in psychology at Wayne State University in 1964, followed by his M.A. and Ph.D. Degrees both at Wayne State University. He is the author or co-author of over 400 publications on the dynamics of behavioral change - most of which expand the theory, test the TTM in randomized controlled trials, and defend the TTM.

#14553

Roger Blackwell

#14564

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Roger Blackwell is an American marketing expert and public speaker. He was described in The New York Times as one of America's top speakers on business and marketing, along with Daniel Burrus and Tom Peters. He has served on the board of directors for multiple companies, most prominently Max & Erma's Restaurant, Inc., Abercrombie & Fitch, and Worthington Foods. Blackwell was a long-time marketing professor at Ohio State University, and has also taught at Stanford University, Cape Town University in South Africa, and Guelph University in Canada. Prior to his retirement, Sales and Marketing Executives International named him Outstanding Marketing Professor in America.

#14554

Victor Halberstadt

#14565

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Victor Halberstadt is a Dutch economist. Biography Halberstadt was born on 16 June, 1939, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He was raised in a Jewish family and experienced the terrors of the Holocaust. From 1965 to 1974, Halberstadt was a senior lecturer of public sector finance at the University of Amsterdam. From 1971 to 1973, he was an adviser of the Directorate-General of the National Budget of the Dutch Ministry of Finance. On 9 September 1974, he was appointed professor of public sector finance of the University of Leiden. In October 1981, he was along with economist Cees de Galan appointed a...

#14555

Robert Turner

#14566

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Robert Turner is a British neuroscientist, physicist, and social anthropologist. He has been a director and professor at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in brain physics and magnetic resonance imaging . Coils inside every MRI scanner owe their shape to his ideas.

#14556

Sean Paul

#14567

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Sean Paul Ryan Francis Henriques is a Jamaican rapper and singer who is regarded as one of dancehall and reggae's most prolific artists. He released his first album, Stage One in 2000, however it was in 2002 that he gained international fame after releasing album Dutty Rock.

#14557

Darcey Bussell

#14568

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Dame Darcey Andrea Bussell, is an English retired ballerina and a former judge on the BBC television dance contest Strictly Come Dancing. Trained at the Arts Educational School and the Royal Ballet School, Bussell started her professional career at Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet, but after only one year she moved to the Royal Ballet, where she became the youngest-ever principal dancer at the age of 20 in 1989. Bussell is widely acclaimed as one of the great British ballerinas.

#14558

Robert Entman

#14569

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Robert Mathew Entman is the J.B. and M.C. Shapiro Professor of Media and Public Affairs and Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University. Education Entman earned his A.B. in political science from Duke University, his M.P.P. in Public Policy Analysis from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow.

#14559

Josie Long

#14570

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Josie Isabel Long is an English comedian. She started performing as a stand-up at the age of 14 and won the BBC New Comedy Awards at 17. In 2006, Long won the If.comeddies Best Newcomer award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for her show Kindness and Exuberance. She has been nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Show three times. In 2012, Long and director Doug King produced two short comedy films in Glasgow called Let's Go Swimming and Romance and Adventure, which were nominated for a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award.

#14560

Charles Goodhart

Charles Goodhart

#14571

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Charles Albert Eric Goodhart, is a British economist. His career can be divided into two sections: his term with the Bank of England and its associated public policy; and his academic work with the London School of Economics. Charles Goodhart's work focuses on central bank governance practices and monetary frameworks. He also conducted academic research into foreign exchange markets. He is best known for formulating Goodhart's Law, which states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

#14561

Kent Flannery

#14572

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Kent Vaughn Flannery is a North American archaeologist who has conducted and published extensive research on the pre-Columbian cultures and civilizations of Mesoamerica, and in particular those of central and southern Mexico. He has also published influential work on origins of agriculture and village life in the Near east, pastoralists in the Andes, and cultural evolution, and many critiques of modern trends in archaeological method, theory, and practice. At the University of Chicago he gained his B.A. degree in 1954; the M.A. in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1964. From 1966 to 1980 he directed proje...

#14562

Neil J. Gunther

Neil J. Gunther

#14573

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Neil Gunther is a computer information systems researcher best known internationally for developing the open-source performance modeling software Pretty Damn Quick and developing the Guerrilla approach to computer capacity planning and performance analysis. He has also been cited for his contributions to the theory of large transients in computer systems and packet networks, and his universal law of computational scalability.

#14563

Kenneth Einar Himma

#14574

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Kenneth Einar Himma is an American philosopher, author, lawyer, academic and lecturer. Born in Seattle, Himma earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois in 1985, his master's from the University of California in 1987, and his doctorate of law from the University of Washington School of Law in 1990, before receiving his PhD in 2001 from the University of Washington for his thesis, "The Status of Legal Principles".

#14564

Andrew Zimmern

#14575

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Andrew Scott Zimmern is an American chef, restaurateur, television and radio personality, director, producer, businessman, food critic, and author. Zimmern is the co-creator, host, and consulting producer of the Travel Channel television series Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, Bizarre Foods America, Bizarre Foods: Delicious Destinations, Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World, Dining with Death, The Zimmern List, and Andrew Zimmern's Driven by Food, as well as the Food Network series The Big Food Truck Tip. For his work on Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, he was presented the James Beard Foundation Award four times: in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2017.

#14565

Animesh Chakravorty

#14576

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Animesh Chakravorty FNA, FASc is a Bengali Indian inorganic chemist. In 1975, he was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in chemistry by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

#14566

Raymond Lemieux

Raymond Lemieux

#14577

Overall Influence

1920 - 2000 (80 years)

Raymond Urgel Lemieux, CC, AOE, FRS was a Canadian organic chemist, who pioneered many discoveries in the field of chemistry, his first and most famous being the synthesis of sucrose. His contributions include the discovery of the anomeric effect and the development of general methodologies for the synthesis of saccharides still employed in the area of carbohydrate chemistry. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society , and a recipient of the prestigious Albert Einstein World Award of Science and Wolf Prize in Chemistry.

#14567

Adom Getachew

#14578

Overall Influence

Adom Getachew is an Ethiopian-American political scientist. She is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.

#14568

Otis Dudley Duncan

#14579

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Otis Dudley Duncan was "the most important quantitative sociologist in the world in the latter half of the 20th century", according to sociologist Leo Goodman. His book The American Occupational Structure, which received the American Sociological Association's Sorokin Award, documented how parents transmit their societal status to their children. Duncan compiled his thoughts on the major issues of the field into Notes on Social Measurement, which he considered his greatest work.

#14569

Harold G. Koenig

#14580

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Harold G. Koenig is a psychiatrist on the faculty of Duke University. His ideas have been covered in Newsweek and other news media with regard to religion, spirituality and health, a focus of some of his research and clinical practice. Templeton Foundation has provided great financial support to his activities.

#14570

Horst Zuse

#14581

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Horst Zuse is a German computer scientist. Life Horst Zuse was born in 1945 as the son of the computer pioneer Konrad Zuse. He first studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin and later on completed his PhD on software metrics. Horst Zuse worked as a Privatdozent at the Technical University of Berlin and was professor at the Hochschule Lausitz , University of Applied Sciences. Besides software engineering, he has concentrated on the history of computer science.

#14571

Elena Besley

#14582

Overall Influence

Elena Besley is a British scientist who is Professor of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. She holds a Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship and is Associate Editor of Nano Letters.

#14572

Amy Wax

#14583

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

#14573

Edmund Rolls

#14584

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Edmund T. Rolls is a neuroscientist and Professor at the University of Warwick. Rolls is a neuroscientist with research interests in computational neuroscience, including the operation of real neuronal networks in the brain involved in vision, memory, attention, and decision-making; functional neuroimaging of vision, taste, olfaction, feeding, the control of appetite, memory, and emotion; neurological disorders of emotion; psychiatric disorders including depression and schizophrenia; and the brain processes underlying consciousness.

#14574

Philip Kim

#14585

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Philip Kim is a South Korean physicist. He is a condensed matter physicist known for study of quantum transport in carbon nanotubes and graphene, including observations of quantum Hall effects in graphene.

#14575

David Eisenberg

David Eisenberg

#14586

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

David S. Eisenberg is an American biochemist and biophysicist best known for his contributions to structural biology and computational molecular biology, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles since the early 1970s and director of the UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics & Proteomics since the early 1990s, as well as a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

#14576

Semyon Gershtein

Semyon Gershtein

#14587

Overall Influence

1929 - 2023 (94 years)

Semyon Solomonovich Gershtein was a Soviet and Russian physicist. He was an academician of Russian Academy of Sciences since 2003. He was a USSR State Prize laureate. Biography Gershtein was born in Harbin, China. After graduating from the Department of Nuclear Physics in Moscow State University, he worked at a school in Kaluga Oblast until 1954. In 1955, he entered the graduate school of the Institute for Physical Problems.

#14577

Melvin Hochster

Melvin Hochster

#14588

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Melvin Hochster is an American mathematician working in commutative algebra. He is currently the Jack E. McLaughlin Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Michigan.

#14578

George Church

#14589

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

George M. Church is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Board of Sponsors. He earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology and chemistry from Duke University. He went on to a graduate biochemistry program at Duke, but became so immersed in his lab work that he abandoned his other coursework and ended up getting withdrawn from the program. Undeterred, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University.

#14579

Skrillex

#14590

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (38 years)

Sonny John Moore , known professionally as Skrillex, is an American DJ and music producer. Growing up in Northeast Los Angeles and Northern California, he joined the post-hardcore band From First to Last as the lead singer in 2004, and recorded two studio albums with the band before leaving to pursue a solo career in 2007. He began his first tour as a solo artist in late 2007. After recruiting a new band lineup, Moore joined the Alternative Press Tour to support bands such as All Time Low and the Rocket Summer, and appeared on the cover of Alternative Presss annual "100 Bands You Need to Know...

#14580

Mary Beth Edelson

#14591

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Mary Beth Edelson was an American artist and pioneer of the feminist art movement, deemed one of the notable "first-generation feminist artists". Edelson was a printmaker, book artist, collage artist, painter, photographer, performance artist, and author. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

#14581

Norma Alarcón

#14592

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Norma Alarcón is a Chicana author and publisher in the United States. She is the founder of Third Woman Press and a major figure in Chicana feminism. She is Professor Emerita of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

#14582

James H. Austin

#14593

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (101 years)

James H. Austin is an American neurologist and author. He is the author of the book Zen and the Brain. It establishes links between the neurophysiology of the human brain and the practice of meditation, and won the Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize for 1998. He has written five sequels: Zen-Brain Reflections , Selfless Insight , Meditating Selflessly , Zen-Brain Horizons and Living Zen Remindfully .

#14583

Tony Oursler

#14594

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Tony Oursler is an American multimedia and installation artist. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, California in 1979. His art covers a range of mediums, working with video, sculpture, installation, performance, and painting. The artist currently lives and works in New York City.

#14584

Norman Cliff

#14595

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Norman Cliff is an American psychologist. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in psychometrics in 1957. After research positions in the US Public Health Service and at Educational Testing Service he joined the University of Southern California in 1962. He has had a number of research interests, including quantification of cognitive processes, scaling and measurement theory, computer-interactive psychological measurement, multivariate statistics, and ordinal methods. One of his major contributions to psychometrics was the method for rotation of canonical components. Asserting that much of psy...

#14585

Tony Hey

#14596

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Professor Anthony John Grenville Hey was vice-president of Microsoft Research Connections, a division of Microsoft Research, until his departure in 2014. Education Hey was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and the University of Oxford. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics in 1967, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics in 1970 supervised by P. K. Kabir. He was a student of Worcester College, Oxford and St John's College, Oxford.

#14586

Frank Welker

#14597

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Franklin Wendell Welker is an American voice actor. He began his career in the 1960s, and holds over 860 film, television, and video game credits as of 2023, making him one of the most prolific voice actors of all time. With a total worldwide box-office gross of $17.4 billion, he is also the third-highest-grossing actor of all time, as of 2011.

#14587

James Bopp

#14598

Overall Influence

James Bopp Jr. is an American conservative lawyer. He is most known for his work associated with election laws, anti-abortion model legislation, and campaign finance. Bopp served as deputy attorney general of Indiana from 1973 to 1975. He later served as Indiana's committeeman on the Republican National Committee , and was the RNC's vice chairman from 2008 to 2012.

#14588

Eiji Osawa

#14599

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

is a former professor of computational chemistry, noted for his prediction of the C60 molecule in 1970. Osawa received his Master's of Engineering in chemistry from Kyoto University's Department of Industrial Chemistry and then became an engineer at Teijin Co., Ltd. In 1964, he returned to Kyoto University and earned a Doctorate of Engineering in chemistry under Professor M. Yoshida. After three years of postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin, Princeton University, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in 1970 he became an assistant professor at Hokkaido University. In...

#14589

Eero Tarasti

#14600

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Eero Aarne Pekka Tarasti , is a Finnish musicologist and semiologist, currently serving as Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of Helsinki. He received his Ph.D. degree at the University of Helsinki in 1978, writing his dissertation Myth and Music on Richard Wagner, Jean Sibelius, and Igor Stravinsky. Then, Tarasti served at the University of Jyväskylä between 1979–1984, where he was appointed Professor of Arts Education in 1979 and Professor of Musicology in 1983. In 1984 he took the position of Professor of Musicology in Helsinki, succeeding Erik Tawaststjerna. Tarasti has hel...

#14590

Karen Neander

#14601

Overall Influence

1954 - 2020 (66 years)

Karen Neander was a philosopher and professor at Duke University. She was known for her work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of action, philosophy of biology, philosophy of neuroscience and cognitive science.

#14591

Gabriela Sabatini

Gabriela Sabatini

#14602

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Gabriela Beatriz Sabatini is an Argentine-Italian former professional tennis player. A former world No. 3 in both singles and doubles, Sabatini was one of the leading players from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, amassing 41 titles. In singles, Sabatini won the 1990 US Open, the Tour Finals in 1988 and 1994, and was runner-up at Wimbledon 1991, the 1988 US Open, and the silver medalist at the 1988 Olympics. In doubles, Sabatini won Wimbledon in 1988 partnering Steffi Graf, and reached three French Open finals. Among Open era players who did not reach the world No. 1 ranking, Sabatini has the most wins over reigning world No.

#14592

Juliette Rennes

Juliette Rennes

#14603

Overall Influence

Juliette Rennes is a French sociologist. Since 2021, she has been the director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences . She is also the director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements . Rennes' research topics are related to the history and sociology of gender, work, and discrimination.

#14593

David Flusser

#14604

Overall Influence

1917 - 2000 (83 years)

David Flusser was an Israeli professor of Early Christianity and Judaism of the Second Temple Period at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography David Flusser was born in Vienna on September 15, 1917. He grew up in Příbram , middle Bohemia, Czechoslovakia and attended the University of Prague. There he met a pastor, Josef Perl, who piqued his interest in Jesus and Christianity. As a young schoolboy his parents had sent him to a Christian school, but in Palestine during the late 1930s he became an observant Jew. Flusser emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, where he completed his doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1957.

#14594

Frank Hayden

#14605

Overall Influence

Frank Joseph Hayden, is a retired physical education/kinesiology professor and pioneer of the Special Olympics from Oakville, Ontario. Personal life Hayden was born in Windsor, Ontario and lives in Burlington. He completed his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Ontario in 1955, and a Master of Science in 1958 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1962 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Hayden joined the faculty of the University of Western Ontario in 1964, then became director of the School of Physical Education and Athletics at McMaster University in 1975. He retired from...

#14595

Yoram Barzel

#14606

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Yoram Barzel was an Israeli economist and a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington. He was interested in property rights, applied price theory, and political economy.

#14596

James F. Keenan

#14607

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

James F. Keenan is a moral theologian, bioethicist, writer, and the Canisius Professor of theology at Boston College. Career Keenan has been a Jesuit of the New York Province since 1970 and an ordained priest since 1982. He received his B.A. at Fordham University in the Bronx, NY, in 1976, after which he pursued his Masters in Divinity at the Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, MA. After receiving his M.Div. and ordination in 1982, James Keenan went on to study at the Gregorian University in Rome, Italy, receiving his S.T.L in 1984 and his S.T.D. in 1988.

#14597

Erik Davis

#14608

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Erik Davis is an American writer, scholar, journalist and public speaker whose writings have ranged from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is perhaps best known for his book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, as well as his work on California counterculture, including Burning Man, the human potential movement, and the writings of Philip K. Dick.

#14598

Charles Hampden-Turner

Charles Hampden-Turner

#14609

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Charles Hampden-Turner is a British management philosopher, and Senior Research Associate at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge since 1990. He is the creator of Dilemma Theory and co-founder and Director of Research and Development at the Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner Group, in Amsterdam.

#14599

Richard G. Smith

#14610

Overall Influence

Richard G. Smith is a British geographer. His research focuses on the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, and urban studies, especially on poststructuralist cities. Academic career Smith was educated at the University of Hull and University of Bristol . Currently he works at Swansea University in the United Kingdom.

#14600

Christophe Breuil

#14611

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Christophe Breuil is a French mathematician, who works in arithmetic geometry and algebraic number theory. Work With Fred Diamond, Richard Taylor and Brian Conrad in 1999, he proved the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture, which previously had only been proved for semistable elliptic curves by Andrew Wiles and Taylor in their proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Later, he worked on the p-adic Langlands conjecture.

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